Family Style

By Christian l. Wright

Published: May 7, 2006

When Francis Paniego made his first foray out from under the wing of his mother, Marisa S?hez -- the winner of Spain's premier national gastronomic award in 1987 -- things didn't go exactly as planned. He had an idea to do quail in puff pastry. ''When I started to make this dish,'' he said recently in the kitchen he still sometimes shares with his mother, ''I was really excited because I'd just come back from working with Pedro Subijana at Akelarre, and I was very full of myself, like St. Peter.'' As soon as he put the tray of fowl into the oven, his mother raised an eyebrow. When he took out the tray, the puff pastry had slipped down around the birds' hips. ''It was absolutely comic,'' Paniego said with a laugh. ''They looked like they'd come out of the bathroom wearing towels around their waists.''

Fast-forward nearly 20 years. In a big, stainless-steel kitchen in a southwestern corner of La Rioja, Spain's famous wine-producing region in the north, Paniego was experimenting with pairing sea bass with a delicate sheet made from crystallized red wine, while his mother occasionally stirred a huge pan of simmering artichokes with bits of ham. Paniego hunched over his dish, inspecting it closely, as if it were a science project; S?hez took her wooden spoon and wandered over to the back of the kitchen, where an enormous pot of lambs' trotters had turned white. She was checking on their progress, as well as that of her classic patatas a la Riojana al estilo de Marisa, which were sure to be in demand on that day's menu at Echaurren, her restaurant. Paniego, meanwhile, disappeared into his lablike office to make notations in a spiral notebook that he keeps for the evolving menu at El Portal de Echaurren, his restaurant. When Paniego re-emerged, his mother chided him for the striped apron he was wearing. ''I prefer him in all white,'' she said. He smiled but didn't change.

The two restaurants share one kitchen, both of which have been overseen by Paniego since his mother's retirement two years ago. (She remains a frequent presence, despite a bad leg.) A swinging wood door leads to the traditional dining room that is famous all over Spain; a sleek beige door opens onto a smaller, modern dining room that is calling new attention to the cuisine of La Rioja. It could be the setup for an upstairs-downstairs drama or, perhaps, a comedy of errors.

In fact, Echaurren, in the small mountain village of Ezcaray, is a little family operation -- there are also 25 hotel rooms -- whose history can be traced back to the 1600's. Four hundred years later, it is still owned and run by the same family. Marisa S?hez, the matriarch, lives with her husband, F?x Paniego, in an apartment above El Portal for most of the year. Francis Paniego, the heir apparent and, at 38, the baby, lives in a renovated stone-and-beam house 50 yards away with his wife and three children. His brother and sommelier, Jos??x, lives next door with his brood. And their sister, Marta, now living in Pamplona, returns on weekends to do the desserts for a bistro the family has opened around the corner.

A Rioja is steeped in tradition. Its people (all 301,084 of them) are creatures of habit and custom, so change has been slow to come to the area. But progress is visible -- both in the low, curvy bodega built by Santiago Calatrava for the Ysios winery below the medieval town of Laguardia, and in a wide-lipped bowl of pumpkin pur?topped with an oyster at El Portal. ''In the Basque country, the evolution started,'' said Juan Mari Arzak, the Michelin three-star chef at Arzak in San Sebasti? where Paniego worked for a year. ''Then it moved to Catalu?And now it's La Rioja. Francis is the beginning of the revolution there.'' Indeed, Paniego won a Michelin star in 2004, the first in the region, and he's been tapped to bring both his mother's recipes and his own to the restaurant in the Frank Gehry-designed hotel that's due to open at the Marqu?de Riscal winery in nearby Elciego this September.

''We are very proud they came looking for us,'' Paniego said. When speaking of Echaurren, he almost always uses the first person plural, because even though he went to cooking school in Madrid and did apprenticeships in some of the best kitchens in the country -- including two with the chef Ferran Adri?whom he calls ''a total influence'' -- there was never a question but that he would go back into the family fold to carry on his mother's legacy while forging his own culinary identity. ''We were chosen because of the two cuisines, the balance of the traditional and the modern,'' he said. Of course, taking on more responsibility is daunting and has awakened him in the middle of the night more than a few times: ''But if I'd said no, everybody would have said what a jerk I was for the rest of my life.''

After decades of S?hez's rule, Paniego makes the decisions these days and is, by all accounts, the boss -- or, as they say in Spanish, the one who cuts the cod. Everyone defers to him, including the squat woman who has wielded the cleaver for 30 years and watched him grow up. ''He's the youngest, but he acts like the oldest,'' his mother said. ''Whatever he says goes. His head is well furnished.'' The transfer of power happened gradually -- before El Portal opened in 2003, Paniego's dishes slowly began to appear among his mother's at Echaurren. But it was his older brother Luis who had been in line to take over, and Francis was his pinche, or kitchen helper. ''When I decided to be a cook,'' he said, ''my greatest dream was to be alongside my brother. I saw him as being so great, so prepared, and the only thing I wanted to do was be by his side.'' When Luis died in a car accident at the age of 26 on Christmas Eve 1987, ''I had to grow up in about 10 days,'' Paniego said. He decided to leave cooking school in Madrid and spend a year at home. ''There were lots of people coming for my mother's food, but they were also coming for Luis's,'' he said. ''So on one side, I had to fight against the success of my mother, and on the other, my brother's ghost.''